I asked Marcus if we could do something different with this post compared with the others in this endorsers series. So instead of me giving a bio introduction to Marcus, he agreed to do a Q&A with me about him and his work at The High Calling and elsewhere. I love learning how people came to do what they do, and Marcus generously shares of his story here, including letting us in on his childhood career dream.

NN: When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

MG: In kindergarten I wanted to work at a car wash. I was so fascinated by the machine itself, and I wanted to be near that machine. It must have been alarming to my parents for me to have drawn a picture of myself drying the windows of somebody’s car as it left the wash. I still want to be close to the machine, but now I have a better understanding of what that means. In some ways, though, an editor is still the guy who puts the polish on what the machine spits out.

Of course, I also have the more traditional answer. I wanted to be a cartoonist, because I liked the idea of telling stories. Then I wanted to be an engineer, because I loved math and statistics. Then I was editor of the newspaper and the literary magazine, and I decided that teaching English was my future.

NN: What was your path to your current position at The High Calling?

MG: I was teaching community college and high school AP English and Literature when a friend in publishing called me about a job at the H. E. Butt Family Foundation working for Mr. Butt himself. I was feeling a little stale at the time, so I tossed an application, resume, and portfolio into the mail. A few weeks later, I was interviewing at Mr. Butt’s house and we hit it off. I remember sharing my vocational approach to teaching high school English. I said something like, "The school district hired me to teach students to write, not bring them to Christ. So if I’m not careful, an evangelical stance in my classroom can be manipulative to the students and dishonoring to my employer. This means my first task is always to honor God by honoring my employer by teaching kids to write really well.” Mr. Butt was quiet for a moment, and then said, “How did you learn this at such a young age? I spent most of my life trying to learn that.”

At the time, I didn’t know where I had learned to approach the gospel in that vocational way. Now I know that Mr. Butt himself had paved the way for me. His work through Laity Lodge and the H. E. Butt Family Foundation had percolated throughout churches in Texas where I spent many of my formative years. In a sense, his life’s work led me to The High Calling even though I didn’t know it. When I was hired, The High Calling was a very small part of my job. There seemed to be so much potential there, and gradually I spent more and more time on it.

NN: How has The High Calling changed since you first became involved?

MG: Back in 2005, The High Calling was probably 10 times smaller than it is now. Each week we published a new audio message, two related devotional articles, and reprints of devotionals written by Eugene Peterson. Shortly after I came on, I started choosing the articles for each week and helping with the audio messages. By accident we discovered that writers with a strong print platform may not have a strong online platform. The Message has sold very well as a print product, for instance, but Eugene Peterson doesn’t attract much of a digital audience. At the time, bloggers attracted the biggest audience. They understood the digital space and understood how to extend digital hospitality to their readers. Gordon Atkinson first introduced us to many of these ideas, and I still remember sketching out some strategic goals on napkins at a pub years ago. As the digital, interactive landscape has changed, expanding beyond blogs to social media, we have tried to change as well. Thus, we don’t lean nearly as much on bloggers as we used to do.

NN: What’s your vision for the future of The High Calling?

MG: Now that we have a new president, David Rogers, we are taking a look at the future of all H. E. Butt Family Foundation programs, including The High Calling. Recently, we relaunched the site to create a better mobile experience for our readers, who are mostly on mobile devices. David Rogers and several of us have been talking about the future in much more comprehensive ways than just a redesign though. Without a doubt you will see some exciting things coming out of the H. E. Butt Family Foundation in the future.

NN: When you’re not working at The High Calling, what else are you working on?

MG: My family is very involved in community theater in our home town. I try to support my kids to follow their passions. My daughter plays violin in a variety of orchestras and recital groups. My son and I work on his 4-H projects together during the fall and winter. And I help coach the local First Lego League. Our robotics team is going to nationals this year!

NN: What role does leisure have in your life? How do you re-fuel? What practices help you reflect back on meaning within ordinary events of your daily work?

MG: I like board games a lot, so I torture my family with Nerd Night. They are fairly accommodating and don’t complain too much. I also like to run, and need to do that at least three or four times a week or I go a little stir crazy.

NN: You have a book of poetry called Barbies at Communion: and Other Poems, published by T. S. Poetry Press in 2010. Tell us about the writing of that volume. Are you working on another book?

MG: Poetry has become my primary form of prayer. I still write a lot of poetry, but I have pulled back from sharing it for several years. It is hard to be fully present for my family if I’m looking to take on a second job in publishing. Instead, I have chosen to engage in local projects, performing Shakespeare with my wife, raising animals with my son, coaching robotics, and all the other things I mentioned. As much as I love writing poetry, there is no time pressure to publish poetry on a national scale. A good poem today should be a good poem in five years. Every now and then I submit to various chap book contests, and I’ve been thinking of submitting another collection somewhere. We’ll see.

Finally, here's what Marcus wrote about Finding Livelihood:

"Finding Livelihood is a breath of radical honesty for the workaday Christian. Nancy Nordenson does not fear the long dark night shift of the soul, but neither does she accept it. Her real world stories of people at work inspire and challenge at every turn."

~~~

For a chance to win a copy of Finding Livelihood, head over to The High Calling,at this link, and share where you're finding meaning in life and work this week and/or what you wanted to be when you grew up.

Thursday, April 23, 2015

I'm delighted to post this next installment of the Finding Livelihood endorser series in honor of Greg Wolfe. Greg is a key force behind and presence in the art-faith conversation that is so vital to cultural stewardship. He and his wife Suzanne started Image Journal in 1989. I think I'm correct in saying they started it and produced it for many years from within their own apartment and at great personal sacrifice. Today it is one of the top five literary quarterlies in terms of paid subscriptions.

In an interview posted on the Image site, Greg said this about starting the journal: "On a fairly obvious level we founded Image to show that great literature and art informed by or grappling with Judeo-Christian faith could still be made. That’s the standard rationale. But another key aspect of our approach was to push back against the near-total domination of the cultural airwaves by secondary discourse, which was (and still often is) highly politicized." Other programs spearheaded by Greg include the Glen Workshop, Image Conference and other lecture events, Milton Center Postgraduate Fellowship, and Shaw Fellowship, and finally near and dear to my heart, the MFA program in creative writing at Seattle Pacific University.

The tagline for the Glen Workshop is "a week can change your life." I first went to a Glen Workshop in 2004 after learning about it when a friend of mine gave me a couple pages from an Image essay by Annie Dillard, and not recognizing the name of the journal, I googled it and discovered the workshop and that Lauren Winner was going to be teaching a track on spiritual writing. I signed up and life indeed was never the same. It's fair to say that Greg's life work has changed my life.

Greg is the author of Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Human in An Ideological Age, Intruding Upon the Timeless, and Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography, as well as several books co-authored with Suzanne Wolfe. Greg is also the editor of several anthologies, including Bearing the Mystery and God With Us.

From Beauty Will Save the World:

Art, like religious faith in general and prayer in particular has the power to help us transcend the fragmented society we inhabit. We live in a Babel of antagonistic tribes – tribes that speak only the language of race, class, rights, and ideology. That is why the intuitive language of the imagination is so vital. Reaching deep into our collective thoughts and memories, great art sneaks past our shallow prejudices and brittle opinions to remind us of the complexity and mystery of human existence. The imagination calls us to leave our personalities behind and temporarily to inhabit another's experience, looking at the world with new eyes. Art invites us to meet the Other – whether that be our neighbor or the infinite otherness of God – and to achieve a new wholeness of spirit.

Saturday, April 18, 2015

For your weekend reading pleasure, here are links to some pieces I've enjoyed the past week:

"This Blessed Place: The faithful fiction of Marilynne Robinson" by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell at America. Just this week I finished reading Lila, the latest novel by Marilynne Robinson in her Gilead trilogy that also includes Gileadand Home. Each of the three novels has left me with a profound sense of having entered a place that operates with a different sort of economy and grace than what we usually expect to encounter in life or on the page. I think this is even more true for Lila than the other two. As O'Donnell writes in this piece, "They posit a community of people who take their faith seriously and strive to live by it; they depict a fallen world, full of common sinners in need of redemption and in whose lives the operation of grace is evident at every turn; and they reveal the luminous beauty of that world, shot through with the goodness of the God who loved it into being and continues to care for it, in ways both large and small." Read this piece by O'Donnell and then if you haven't already read this trilogy, consider putting it high on your reading list.

"Mad Men: The Imperceptibility of Change" by Alissa Wilkinson at Christ & Pop Culture. I've been watching Mad Men throughout its seven seasons. Lots of people think it's full of so much debauchery that it's best left unwatched. I can understand that opinion and have felt that way myself at times. But my husband and I have stuck with the series, not only because it's been a fascinating cultural study of the era in which we grew up, but more so because we've come to care about the characters, particularly Don Draper and Peggy Olson, as obviously the show's creator does also. It's the genius of good fiction to be able to trigger empathy. As the series moves towards its last handful of episodes, the question on the table is, What will happen to these characters? In this piece, Wilkinson speculates on whether Mad Men will end as tragedy or as comedy. It's worth a read even if you don't watch Mad Men, because she provides a framework for thinking about other narratives, for thinking about life.

"Consider the Oven" by Sheryl Cornett at Art House America. Sheryl is a friend of mine and she just published this piece about making do. She tells of finally getting a new range in her kitchen after cooking on a make-shift out-of-code oven in her garage for 5 years, her tight-budget response to the breakdown of her initial range. It made me think about how wonderful it felt last fall when I finally had our dryer fixed after going 3 years hanging clothes on the line because it just always seemed there were more important places for money to go than the dryer. If you've ever had to or tried to "make-do", you'll resonate with this essay written in the spirit of gratitude.

"A Convention for the Bookish" by Dani Shapiro at The New Yorker. Last week, I attended the annual meeting of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), which was here in Minneapolis. I heard figures of between 12,000 and 15,000 people attended (with those kinds of numbers, is it any wonder writers get so many rejections?). Dani Shapiro, author of Devotion and Still Writing, wrote this piece about the three-day event. "It’s a familiar lament that books are dying—that the fast-paced and attention-starved digital age is killing our impulse to read and write the old-fashioned way—but it was impossible to feel anything but buoyant optimism about the future of letters when traversing the streets and skyways of Minneapolis."

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Today is tax day and also book release day. I’m happier about the second than the first, particularly because I owe taxes and will be getting no refund. Interestingly, in The Geography of Bliss, Eric Weiner writes about an experiment in which researchers found that happy places in the brain fire off when we involuntarily write checks for things like taxes, just as they do when we voluntarily donate to a good cause of our choosing, a phenomenon I will watch for with skepticism as I write my federal and state checks today. But back to the book release. I so very much hope that those of you who pre-ordered the book and will be receiving it in the mail any day now will love the burst of spring green color on its cover as you take it out of the mailing envelope. And even more, I so very much hope that you will like what you find on its pages. And finally, today is also a happy day because it’s the birthday of a very good friend, Marleen, whom I’ve known since fourth grade, long before either of us thought at all about taxes, but even then were dreaming of who and what we’d be when we grew up.

I have heard Emilie Griffin speak only once, about 10 years ago, and it made a lasting impact on me, particularly when contrasted with another event. Just a couple days before hearing her speak at a Renovaré conference, I had been to another spiritual formation-type event where the keynote speaker owned the theatrically-lit stage with her choreographed moves and dramatic memorized oratory. I went home and wrote in my journal, “Is this entertainment or content? Probably more entertainment. It discouraged me quite a bit.” In contrast, for her talk at Renovaré, Griffin stayed at the lectern and spoke in a simple style, referring to her notes. About her, I afterward wrote in my journal, “she was marvelous…and said so many wonderfully rich things.” Authenticity and depth win, in my opinion.

After hearing Griffin speak, I bought The Reflective Executive at the book table and found a kindred spirit. It was the first book I had seen about spirituality in the marketplace. Here’s an excerpt:

"God is here! He is actually present! It is not beneath him to dwell on the Staten Island ferry, heading for Lower Manhattan. He is willing to descend with us into the underground chambers of the subway, to be with us in discomfort, boredom, alienation. He accompanies us to the boardroom. He attends the year-end meeting. In the community formed by us, by colleagues, by purchasers, buyers and sellers, customers satisfied and unsatisfied, he is present, bearing our sorrows, acquainted with grief.

What a contrast to our common way of thinking: that business, which is by its very nature materialistic, somehow has to be spiritualized. The reality is otherwise. It is our mistake to think that we will somehow take business, which is unholy, and by some sacrifice or offering, make it holy. That tragic mistake is the crucial error we must expose. To correct this false notion we need not only action but contemplation.

Contemplation is the radical work of the marketplace. Reflection is our passage to reality, to a new understanding, a different consciousness. In reality it is God, not we, who initiates the transformation of the world. We are here not to transform but to be transformed, to accept the changes that grace will bring about.”

"Finding Livelihood is deeply felt and deeply satisfying to the reader. Nordenson grapples with hard questions and avoids easy answers. Of work itself she writes: “You take the first steps in a state of delight, equipped with skill or talent, ready to make a difference. But the path is never straight, and it takes you through places you never envisioned.” Nordenson's book is practical, powerful, and rooted in biblical wisdom and the wisest thought of the Western tradition. With a light step, and gratitude, Nordenson teaches us to deal with jagged changes and ugly surprises, “to live and work in the flow of God's love.”

~~~

You can now pre-order Finding Livelihood from: 1) the publisher, Kalos Press; 2) Amazon; or 3) me (ask if you want it signed). Ordered books will be mailed on release date of April 15, 2015 - tax day!

“Far from my high school daydreams about the future, I am on a search for daily meaning as well as for daily bread, for living rather than dying. I want to cast my net on the side of astonishment.... I want to find God at work in me and through me. I want livelihood.

Livelihood: the word gathers up and bundles together the simultaneous longings for meaning, satisfaction, and provision. In the fullest sense of the word, livelihood means the way of one’s life; it means the sustenance to make that way possible; it means both body and soul are fully alive thanks to what has been earned or received by grace. On one level we make our livelihood; on another level we keep our eyes open and find it.”

–Nancy J. Nordenson, Finding Livelihood: A Progress of Work and Leisure (Kalos Press)

By day I'm a medical writer. After hours I do another kind of work. Creative writing, spiritual writing, essaying. This blog arises from those after hours. I write about work/vocation, meaning, hope, imagination, faith, science, creativity/writing, books, and anything else I feel the impulse to write about. I hope these short posts provide camaraderie for your own creative and spiritual life.